Painting with metaphor
What is a metaphor? Metaphor is something that means something else.
Often in and through Art we create a parallel reality, Representational reality that is not the true one, yet we participate in it with our feelings, thoughts and desires, and that makes it even more meaningful, more real than the actual reality. In a painting, for example, we have the freedom to build, destroy, we can make the sky red, the grass blue, we can turn a car into a dog, or we can make a man have three legs, we can disfigure a face and yet we can call it beautiful... we can change things... we have the freedom to express ourselves and be ourselves. We can be a director, a designer, a player all at the same time. We are able to express ourselves through splashes of color which is an association expression that takes us into a world of emotions, or we can express our inside world through images which is a voice from our unconscious world. Here we meet another common thing between art and therapy. World of art and therapy both explore the inner man’s world with human desires and urge for freedom.
Actually, art itself is “Representational reality " phenomenon. It is only a reference, symbol, sign base; it is striving for another world different from the real one but is not that world itself. But also because both creation and perception of art are always associated with a "receiving" of something for something else, that is not itself.
If we try to define the concept of Representational reality, maybe it would be defined as that psychological phenomenon that turns, before the eyes of the perceiver, the literal into something non-literal; the specific into something other than itself; the direct into indirect.
Representational reality is the opposite of literal and concrete. It is the magic that "turns" in our minds a particular object, action or event into something more than itself. It is the breakthrough in the objective world, which helps us to continue - with the help of fantasy, imagination, abstract thinking - into the object, substance, concreteness, and to go beyond. It gives us the opportunity not to see the literal, not stumble in it, not to bump in it as in a wall but to get through, beyond, to reach or see a whole new endless world that opens behind it. Representational reality’s means could be the symbol, metaphor, allegory ... imagery as a whole.
We all have a drive, constant hunger and willingness to aesthetic completeness and complete harmony.
In this sense, every human being is an artist by definition; by nature. Each view of reality, each captured image from it, every touch to the surrounding world is a form of processing, of thinking over and living through. Awake and watching human eyes, open to the world around, are inevitably always creative looks. There is no Creativity only in lethargy; in death. Consciously living is inevitable a creative act, an act of tension and constant struggle, an act of interpretation and inevitably a unique insight into what we call reality.
Ira Simidchieva